Sanchez: Paying for meaningful content

Chances are, if you're reading this right now, you're either a print or online subscriber to the Register.

Under new owners, the Register is implementing a paywall model and adopting a radically customer- and community-focused strategy. To some, this move may seem illogical or even regressive.

But many in the newspaper business believe this may be the start of an industry-wide trend.

Is this an altogether positive or negative development? Your opinion on the subject probably depends on your philosophy about information and communications.

Digital purists seek for all information to be freely available to the masses at little to no cost. But let's not forget that the primary business of Google, that ubiquitous search engine that we all rely on, is advertising.

And the economics of advertising is at the crux of the issue for newspapers.

The World Wide Web is theoretically infinite, and the ad inventory is as well. When you have infinite supply and finite demand, the price of online advertising is pushed inexorably downward, and the consequent return on investment in the same trajectory.

The conventional way to make money online in non-paywall media is to produce an ever-greater quantity of content, in the hopes that it will "rank" on Google, get pageviews, and in turn, generate ad impressions.

The problem is, this unending race to produce greater quantities of content more quickly leads to under-the-gun re-writes of press releases and other commoditized "news." Chances are, almost all of your other competing "free" sites have the same story, or some variation thereof, with varying degrees of original writing or contextual background.

This gets to the issue of value.

Of what real value is pre-packaged, formulaic talking points extolling the virtues of a certain product, service or staged event, when it's picked up, regurgitated, re-Tweeted, Pinterested, and Facebooked by every other "free" media outlet?

At what point is the convenience and ubiquity of free media outweighed by the desire for meaningful, personal context and relevance? The fact of the matter is, quality writing and original reporting requires human intelligence and analysis. And few are willing, no matter how passionate for their craft, to do it for free.

Quality work deserves to be rewarded.

Although many consumers show initial resistance to the idea of a paywall after nearly 20 years of being conditioned to expect online information for free, some are coming to realize that to nurture and support the coverage and reporting of issues and communities that matter to them, it's worth paying for.

In all honesty, many newspapers were struggling financially long before the Web became the all-pervasive presence it is today, and there's no guarantee the paywall model, in its many variations, is a panacea for all the industry's issues.

But if the tide could be turned to being able to consistently pay professional journalists a well-deserved living wage for their work, it would be a step in the right direction.

--Edward A. Sanchez is an automotive journalist who lives in North Laguna Hills. He grew up in Northern California's Silicon Valley. He has lived in Southern California for the past 14 years, and in Orange County for the last eight.

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